Bottega Veneta fragrance notes
Head
- pink peppercorn, bergamot, lily of the valley
Heart
- jasmine, leather, patchouli
Base
- oakmoss
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Latest Reviews of Bottega Veneta

Here, there are wisps of creativity doing battle with the demographic marketing-stifled design-by-numbers-ghoul style which had by post-recession become de rigeur. Pink pepper and bergamot set on a backdrop of old-school milky lactonic fruit notes, something like praline and muguet, a biting woody-tobacco essence filled in with fractioned patchouli molecules, lifted by jasmine sambac in the heart, and settled onto the chypre-ish base best describe Bottega Veneta. This isn't for everyone, and it's not meant to be, although I find the leather more suederal than isobutylquinoline, velveteen rather than sour, almost to the point you can miss it, I also get the faintest trace of violet ionones zipping around. Bottega Veneta is a smart perfume, and one that some may liken to a distant cousin of Jolie Madame by Pierre Balmain (1953), of which a sample was sent to me along with a sample of this to compare old and new approaches to a similar concept. This is much more pepper and patchouli than fruit and leather, which is where Jolie Madame chooses to live, so it feels more punchy. Performance is adequate. Since both are headed for unicorn-land, I'd get the Jolie first myself, as it's more unique.
Overall, I like Bottega Veneta, and it honesty reminds me more of discontinued male-market things like Vera Wang for Men (2004) or Kokorico by Jean-Paul Gaultier (2011) released in the same year. All those things played with fruity over woody and isolated patchouli molecules too, and all of them ended up being flushed out of existence by the time the 2020's dawned on us, since things have only gotten even more dystopian in the designer perfume market (and indeed much of the world over) since then. Rather than depress you on the state of once was and the potential shape of things to come, I'll just say that you aren't missing out on too much here unless you were a particular fan of these nü-chypre exercises, where the last sliver of allowable oakmoss was used to anchor a melange of synthetic things from the Sweet-n-Low version of labdanum in things like Emporio Armani Si (2013) - Bottega Veneta's closest rival - to the vanilla ambergris thing that Creed Aventus (2010) and its many clones begat. The differentiating factor for the also-discontinued Bottega Veneta was that ghost of violet leather past, but is it enough? Thumbs up

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